Take a walk in my shoes

A Persona Mapping study to improve Trading Experience

Research Background

For Zerodha, a popular Trading App, what followed a successful Marketing Campaign, was a rapid adoption of the app and a considerable increase in the User base

Research Objectives

The client wants to gain a renewed understanding of the various investor personas that use its app. They intended to answer 2 key questions through the study:

A) What are the various persona approaches to ‘Risk’ and ‘Opportunity’ when investing

B) How may we optimize the UX design to best suit the usage and expectation of the new users

Since the case study is under NDA, I have omitted and altered images, parts of the research and design results based on my discretion. The information and data in these presentations do not necessarily reflect client's points of view.
Research Methodology

For a comprehensive understanding we had to recruit a mix of users

32 In-depth Interviews

60 minute one on one interviews

Current Trading Profile:

  New users of Zerodha, joined in the last 3 months or less

         Mix of stocks traders & Options Traders

         Mix Intraday Traders + Standard Traders

         Made investments worth > $10,000 + in the last 12 months

Timeline

8 weeks

With the selected participants we first had interviews followed by usability tests. We used observation-based research to capture a thorough sense of how users interacted with the app and how they use features.

Basis their investment outlook, appetite for risk, technographic preferences we arrived at 4 trader profiles

 Agrarians are naturally patient and want a simple method that they can execute repeatedly. They are great trend followers and exemplify consistency. However, because they value hard work and a fair return for effort, they can become extremely discouraged with the randomness of results in financial markets

Features used:

Alerts and

Quick Quotes

Watchlist identified future candidate for Reverse Crossover implementations.

Warriors are the pit traders that typify this archetype, and many of the traders profiled in the Market Wizards series are Warriors. They are incredibly courageous and are able to see opportunity where others see only risk. That said, Warriors are also the colorful characters who double down, revenge trade, and blow up a few accounts before they "mature"

Features used:

Analysis Tab

Watchlists with very specific columns (Greeks, Implied Volatility)

Lower Studies (MACD, RSI)

Realists approach trading pragmatically, as a business, and calculate their return on investment (ROI) on a daily basis. They don't care about being right, they don't care why a method works; they just want to make money. Realists, however, can fall into depression during periods of drawdown

Features used:

Alert features

News

Engineers have have supremely logical minds, love spreadsheets, and tend to be perfectionists. They bring a methodical accuracy to their trading, but they sometimes struggle to shift into a probabilistic mindset, which seems like fuzzy thinking to them. Therefore, they sometimes can't see the forest for the trees

Features used:

Charting

Studies

Watchlists with Study Filter Columns

Impact and Next Steps:

The study helped Zerodha gain a granular understanding of their investors and how they engage with the app enabling them to improve the efficacy of their UX efforts

The study then went into a Quantitative phase, to identify the sizes of each of the segments/ investor profiles